Student Inventions Built on MediaTek LinkIt™ ONE Development Platform Win MobileHeroes Awards

TAIWAN, Hsinchu – December 18, 2015 – This week MediaTek announced five awards for university student teams who developed wearables and Internet of Things inventions. The awards ceremony was a culmination of ITRI MobileHeroes, a multi-month product development tournament in Taiwan sponsored by MediaTek. The company provided the MediaTek LinkIt ONE platform and training to all 24 participating teams in the Wearables and Internet of Things category.

“MediaTek is proud to help the next generation of developers who continually demonstrate the skill and talent they can offer the IoT industry,” said Marc Naddell, Vice President of MediaTek Labs. “This year’s entries are outstanding and creatively use Internet of Things technology to advance different aspects of today’s society.”

The following student inventions, built on the MediaTek LinkIt ONE platform, received prizes in the Internet of Things and Wearables track:

Addressing concerns over widespread consumer drone use, LinkIt ONE powers this product’s ability to create drone “no-fly” zones as well as track and remotely retrieve lost drones.

Second prize: Easy Sous-Vide

Sous-vide is a cooking method that heats food in a water bath at a regulated temperature. Long seen as a complex and expensive technique, the winning team simplifies this with LinkIt ONE by allowing users to select a recipe on a smartphone that automatically sets the heating curve on the device. Users can then share their recipes on social networks via Easy Sous-Vide.

Third prize: LINKTEAM

More than ten thousand cyclists are involved in traffic accidents each year, with more than 60 percent of these caused by the cyclist getting lost. The “LINKTEAM” is a wearable system that allows cyclist teams to communicate directions and locations among each other, preventing such accidents.

Best Campus Elite Prize: OCeanAgent

The OceanAgent is a robotic fish that helps scientists collect underwater data. LinkIt ONE, in the robot, collects the ocean’s environmental data, such as pressure and temperature, then converts the data into communications back to oceanographers. Ocean Agent improves the cost, latency and transmission rates of underwater IoT activities, eliminating the need for high-cost submarine cables.

Special Judge Prize: Re-Talk

Re-Talk is a language recognition system with the ability to help non-verbal people communicate. With customized Bluetooth® low-energy data-gathering gloves, the system built on LinkIt ONE collects gestures and translates them into text and spoken word for Bluetooth Smart Ready devices.

Through its sponsorship of MobileHeroes, MediaTek helped recruit and train participants, encouraging young developers to realize their ideas on the LinkIt development platform for IoT and wearables. In addition, the company provided five experienced employees as judges.

Based around MediaTek MT2502 (Aster), the world’s smallest commercial System-on-Chip (SoC) for wearables, the MediaTek LinkIt ONE development platform enables developers to design and prototype wearables and IoT devices, using hardware and an API, similar to those offered for Arduino boards.

MediaTek sponsored three MobileHeroes tracks: IoT and Wearables; the Antenna track, to help recruit interns and boost awareness of the company; and the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) track for big data analysis.

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About MediaTek

Since 1997, MediaTek has been a pioneering fabless semiconductor company and a market leader in cutting-edge systems-on-chip (SoC) for mobile devices, wireless networking, HDTV, DVD and Blu-ray. Our tightly-integrated, innovative chip designs help manufacturers optimize supply chains, reduce the development time of new products, and extend a competitive edge in crowded markets. Through MediaTek Labs, the company is also building a developer hub that will support device creation, application development, and services for the Internet of Things era. By building technologies that help connect individuals to the world around them, MediaTek is enabling people to expand their horizons and more easily achieve their goals. We believe anyone can achieve something amazing. And we believe they can do it every single day. We call this idea Everyday Genius and it drives everything we do.